This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

How do you turn a magazine into a TV show? And what does that look like?

It's not an easy question. According to the people behind "The New Yorker Presents" — which will debut at the Sundance Film Festival — it hasn't been easy. Even describing the show seems to be a challenge.

"The idea is that it celebrates the eclecticism of the magazine itself, and so while the focus is nonfiction, nevertheless, we embrace the humor, whether it be in the cartoons or in some of the shorter humor pieces," said executive producer Alex Gibney. "We are transforming some of the fiction pieces into dramatic pieces in video and also doing documentaries that are inspired by or come directly out of some of the nonfiction pieces in The New Yorker."

Well, that's … unclear.

The first couple of episodes of "The New Yorker Presents" will screen at Sundance on Wednesday, Jan. 27, at 5:30 p.m. at the Egyptian Theatre, followed by a Q&A session. The series begins streaming on Amazon Prime on Feb 16; two episodes will be released weekly.

New Yorker editor David Remnick said he went into the project "very carefully."

"When I started as an editor of the magazine 17 years ago, the job was to put out a print magazine and once a week. And that was a pretty big job."

Since then, the magazine has gone online. It has a public radio show. And, now, there's this streaming TV series.

He said the goal is not just to do television, but to do "great television." And that means not a show about the people who work at the magazine.

"You don't want a television show about behind the scenes of The New Yorker," Remnick said. "That will last about 20 minutes because it's just a bunch of people humped over desks, writing and working. That won't wash."

According to executive producer Kahane Cooperman ("The Daily Show"), "every single piece except for one came directly from" the magazine. Well, except for the interstitial bits "that are sort of about life in New York" that he nonetheless insisted "are in the spirit of The New Yorker."

That's up to executive producers Gibney and Cooperman and the filmmakers working on the various episodes.

"What you want is The New Yorker as a collective of intelligences and creative personalities who have the capacity to go out into the world, whether it's in fiction or nonfiction, bring these stories home, and then … do something with it that makes sense for television."

This project is clearly dependent on people outside The New Yorker.

"Inside the magazine, we don't pretend to be experts at television," Remnick said. "We are in, kind of, an advise-and-consent role with our partners at Amazon and [production company] Jigsaw."

And the editor's review is, perhaps not surprisingly, all thumbs up.

"I've been thrilled — absolutely thrilled — about the results," Remnick said. "What these guys have done, taking stories that began in one form and making them real television, whether it's funny or moving or deep or journalistic, the results have been astonishing. And I'm over the moon about it."

Twitter: @ScottDPierce —

'The New Yorker Presents'

Two episodes of Amazon's new streaming series "The New Yorker Presents" will screen at Sundance on Wednesday, Jan. 27, at 5:30 p.m. at the Egyptian Theatre in Park City, followed by a Q&A session. The series begins streaming on Amazon Prime on Feb 16; two episodes will be released weekly.